'(of course) all this is a bit exaggerated.'

so wrote blok  of his hatred of florence (the heat, the mosquitoes, the tourism). 

blok did not like florence, he wrote  in the first of his poems about the city

'die, florence, you judas, vanish in the darkness of ages!'

but this is not the whole story. for blok florence has betrayed its glorious past and yet it still serves a purpose in  his cycle of poems. 

'the farther south one goes, the more deserted the landscape becomes; the less life there is above ground, the more distinctly audible are the underground voices of the dead.'- blok in 'the lightning flash of art'.

horsemouth proceeds with lucy vogel's book on blok's italian journey. 

he has been watching a drama/ thriller without sin over four consecutive evenings. it was set in the coalfields of the north. it all ends up well in the end. the youth are raving it up in the control rooms of the old pits - the thriller portrays this as a bad thing  but this does not seem a bad solution to horsemouth. the pits are slap bang next to the housing estates. the housing estates are riddled with crime fueled by money from the drugs trade. 

of course this is just a thriller not a sociological document. here we have gone to the north to hear the voices of the dead - britain’s former coal regions have 5.5 million people living in them, one in 12 of the population. they  are statistically distinct from the rest of the UK, with significantly higher levels of deprivation, illness and unemployment with 14% of adults in the coalfields out of work and on benefits, 40% higher than the national average. (horsemouth paraphrases, well, copies and pastes this, from a guardian article). 

horsemouth could really do with being elsewhere round about now but he has his usual problem that he can't be in two places at once.